Abstract

Remarkable progress has been achieved in the last decade in understanding transverse pattern formation in lasers and other nonlinear optical systems. Order parameter equations have been derived for many nonlinear optical systems. The Turing patterns (tilted waves, stripes, hexagons), also the Ising (localized) structures (optical vortices, spatial solitons) have been theoretically predicted, and experimentally observed. The above phenomena were found and investigated predominantly in two-dimensional (2D) systems, where the fields depend on two transverse spatial coordinates and evolve slowly in time. Very little is known about three-dimensional spatial light structures - field associated with the emission of large numbers of longitudinal and transverse modes.

© 1998 IEEE